Informatica, a provider of data integration software, announces the availability of two data integration capabilities for the insurance industry: XMap and HParser. Working alone or in concert, the improved capabilities enable insurers to address the opportunities and challenges around ACORD insurancestandards and big data.

In a recent customer-hosted benchmark, XMap and HParser were used in the processing of three gigabytes of proprietary insurance XML on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). The entire XML processing took only 50 seconds on a 16-node Amazon EMR cluster.

"Eighty percent of ACORD data adheres to XMLstandards and anything that eases and speeds XML mappings and transformations can have a positive impact on insurance operations," said Ash Kulkarni, senior vice president and general manager, B2B and messaging for Informatica. "The XMap and HParser capabilities in Informatica 9.5 are setting thestandard in terms of solutions needed for insurance IT organizations—the former for how it enables the most complex ACORD XML schemas to be mapped with ease and the latter for how it efficiently executes XML transformations natively on Hadoop clusters for cost-effective, high-performance processing of big insurance data."